


I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow

by jane_wanderlust



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, Half-Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-25
Updated: 2012-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-30 02:19:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_wanderlust/pseuds/jane_wanderlust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was her first everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the song "Take This Waltz," by Leonard Cohen.

\--------------------------------

 

  
When Rebekah is nine years old, she trips on the way back from buying eggs at market: twists her feet over a loosed root. The dirt is hard and cool under her skin, but as she hears Niklaus’s laughter from some paces behind her, her face feels hot.  
   
He is twelve, reed-thin, and his face is still undecided whether it’s better acquainted with happiness or sadness.  
   
She wishes Elijah were here.  
   
She wants to yell at Niklaus; wants to swear she will tell Mother about his cruelty as she sits there in the earth with her shame bright in her face. But as her mouth opens, he reaches out a hand and pulls her up. There’s amusement still in his eyes, but it’s softer now, gentler; and her anger is, too.  
   
They walk home in relative silence, Niklaus trailing a stick in their wake, and Rebekah bright-eyed over the lost eggs.  
   
Before reaching their door, he sits her down on a split log tucked into the woods, pushes her dirty skirts up her knobby legs and sets his fingers to her bloodied knees. She watches as his long fingers – elegance starting to bloom in their length – pick broken remnants of eggshells from the fabric of her dress.  
  
When he braces his hands on her knees and lowers his lips to first one, then the other, her face heats again, something not quite shame glowing in her cheeks.  
   
When he pulls back his mouth is red with her blood and when he smiles his lips pull off to the left just a tint too much.  
   
Later, when Mother asks about the eggs, Niklaus answers that he pushed Rebekah down, that it is his fault they are ruined. His long face is set, his jaw is tight, and Rebekah’s throat is, too.  
   
Later still, when Father drags Niklaus to the stables and lashes him twelve times – one for each year of his trickery – Rebekah follows. She clenches her fists and shakes for every crack of leather on skin. Her face feels hot, but she does not cry.  
   
Later still, after Father’s left, she walks over to Niklaus, lays her hands on the ruined skin of his back and places her lips to his shoulders; first one, then the other.  
   
When she pulls back her mouth is red with his blood.  
   
(Years later, she will fall again, and this time Niklaus really will have tripped her; pushed her down.  
   
This time, when he lowers his lips to her knees, he doesn’t stop.  
   
And her face is heated, her cheeks glow. But as she arches her back under the heat of his mouth, she thinks there is nothing of shame in her blood.)

  


\-------

   
When Rebekah is sixteen years old, she receives her first kiss.  
   
At least, the one that she can speak of; the one she can tell her friends of as they clasp her hands and bounce on the balls of their feet.  
   
Aneurin is the butcher’s son, and he is sweet, if a bit shy. She doesn’t tell them that his lips are too thin, that his hair is too dark. She doesn’t tell them that her real first kiss, the one of full lips and fevered breathing, took place the year prior. She doesn’t tell them that this one she did not receive, this one she  _took._ In the middle of winter, with frost pressing at her ankles.  
   
Niklaus sits at the table, polishing his hunting knives, as she tells Ena and Idelle how Aneurin pulled her behind a birch tree.  
   
Niklaus laughs and stands, sheathing his knife in his belt.  
   
If his laugh sounds a bit bitter, she doesn’t notice. She sees instead the set of his shoulders as he walks from the room; feels the heat of the fire putting blood in her cheeks.  
   
(Years later, she will take kisses from him again.  
   
She will lose count of the ones she takes; she will lose count of the ones he steals.  
   
Years later the knives he keeps in his belt will push into her ribs, and his mouth will break her heart.)  
  
\-------  
   
Rebekah dies a virgin.  
   
The vampire in her wants and wants and never can find solace in  _enough._  
   
She learns this fully when she lets a human take her into bed and he dies under her thighs; with her fangs in his neck and his blood in her veins. She pushes herself off of him and runs.  
   
She runs until she finds Niklaus, and oddly – fiercely – she wishes Elijah were here. Elijah would rid of the mess with grace, and if he felt anything of shame in her actions, he would never say. Niklaus only laughs at her distress.  
   
“Why do you care about a  _human?_ ” he asks her as they walk back to the house.  
  
His dialect has changed slightly with the times, but his anger still simmers the same as it has since they were children. Playing in the dirt with bloodied knees. It has not been that long since he too was a human. She hates what he ignores; mourns what he chooses to push aside.  
  
But as she looks at him, at the way his lips pull tight to the side with his distaste, she feels the hunger reignite in her limbs, in the base of her neck, in the heat that pools in her gut.  
  
It’s not enough, even full of life and warmth as she is, she’s left unsatisfied still. She never can reach  _enough._  
   
(Niklaus is the one to take her innocence from her, which is an ill-suited phrase because she hasn’t been innocent since she’s been dead; since she’s been a monster, an abomination against nature.  
   
But his hands - fully sheathed in elegance now - as they glide across her skin make her feel every last inch of beautiful.  
   
Everything feels right when it should feel wrong, and nothing in her hurts, but everything  _aches_  with a sort of momentum she can’t quite attribute to the vampire beating in her veins.  
   
Her thighs shake around his waist; her hands shake at the nape of his neck.  
   
Her whole world narrows and snaps, and everything is entirely  _too much_.)  
   


\-------

   
Rebekah doesn’t know if she believes in everything, but she knows she believes in  _something._  
   
There isn’t anything really that tells her what she’s feeling (for her brother -  _for her brother_ ) is love, but she doesn’t think it’s fair to call it anything otherwise.  
   
It’s been years - centuries even - and nothing about this will ever be anything other than rushed touches behind closed doors, and meaning-laden looks during pretentious dinners; surrounded by people they only eat with after the dishes are cleared.  
   
So one day, while listening to a woman she guesses is a friend gush on about her betrothed, she decides that, while this story is very boring, and this woman very dull, she wants that: what this very dull woman has.  
   
Someone she can touch in public, and claim as her own, without the misconceiving title of “brother” linking their affections.  
   
So she moves on.  
   
She accepts the suitor who makes her laugh the most: a young, charming man named Dominic. He has modern ideals, and wants to write about worlds that don’t exist, and things that aren’t real. He fascinates her. And she can restrain herself enough to keep him alive, and  _that,_  she tells herself, is what love must be.

When Niklaus hears of her engagement, he shows up at her door.

He had been out traveling for months - finding new continents, new species, something odd and far away. She doesn’t exactly know.  
   
Rebekah is wondering how he’s found out, when he holds up a letter draped in Elijah’s scrawl, and she wishes Elijah were here so she could box him about his ears and berate him for being a traitor.  
   
He pushes his way in, and she pretends her skin doesn’t heat up at the contact. When he asks her about Dominic, she tells Niklaus of his dreams, of his ambitions; she doesn’t know why. Maybe it really is love.  
   
“He writes about fantastical things, does he?” Niklaus asks, and she can tell from the bite in his tone that what he’s working on will cut her.  
   
“Does he know about real monsters then, sister? Does he know how you suck the life out of everyone you touch?” He’s closer than he should be, and his breath brushes across her cheeks. “Does he know about how you let your  _brother_  touch you?”  
  
She slaps him, hard, and goes up to her room. She can’t account for the warmth in her stomach or the clenching of her thighs.  
   
She hears about Dominic’s accident after luncheon the next day. An animal attack, they tell her. Everything in her goes cold and dark, and she feels her heart break into fragments that saw at her lungs.    
   
(Years later he will break her heart, again; after the first time.  
   
Years later when Niklaus has become Nik, and Stefan has found them in some smoky lounge, Rebekah will believe she has found something again.  
   
But all those years later, Niklaus –  _Nik_  - will surprise her again, as he always does, and he will pull from her her happiness, and then shove a dagger deep into her heart.  
   
When she awakens again almost a century later, it will take her only the amount of time to figure out what has happened to forgive him.  
   
But that’s not surprising: her forgiving him without reason.  
   
It’s definitely not the first.)

 

\--------------------------------

 

**Author's Note:**

> For youcallitwinter over at LJ.


End file.
